Son meets stranger who pulled his badly burned father out of house fire in Brecksville (photos)

2018-05-03T20:21:42Z2018-05-03T23:25:56Z

BRECKSVILLE, OH -- A week after a devastating house fire, the son of a man badly burned met the man who helped pull his father from the home.

Jonah Viets was happy to meet Paul Filippi, telling him, "Had you not been here he might not have made it."

Paul replied "It's one of those things, timing is everything I guess."

In a picture Paul took, the flames were intense -- a more than 100-year-old wood home is no match for fire.

It is what he saw when he saw Jonah's father Joe "He was on the front porch and as he was comin' off the porch the house was just engulfed in flames," he said.

So were Joe's clothes. He is burned over 30 percent of his legs and has a broken shoulder.

Jonah sorted through a pile of ruined family memories calling out as he found them "A lot of old Rolling Stones ... old cook books ... Hendricks ... "

None that can be saved. Inside the home, clearly there is also nothing to save, it is a burned out shell.

It is hard to imagine any good coming out of this rubble but Jonah found some.

"Starting from scratch, it may sound morbid but it's comforting in that you can only go up nowhere to go but forward. It really reminds you that it is all replaceable none of it matters but what we have, our lives," he said.

Jonah's dad remains at Metro's burn unit. The fire began outside the front and somehow spread into the home where John Viets was sleeping in an upstairs bedroom.

The part of the story that moves Jonah is the way people have reached out to offer support.

"I was amazed ... my seventh grade bus driver ... she recognized the house and stopped by my place of work just to see if I was OK. That really restores a lot of faith," he said.

A GoFundMe page has been set up to help the family get back on its feet.

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